TOM UTLEY: I bet those Gen-Zers couldn’t tell you why a right-handed gentleman should always sleep on the left side of the bed…

Adult instructions echo through the years from my childhood: “Sit up straight!” Elbows off the table! Stop playing with your food! Don’t speak with your mouth full! Hold on to your knife and fork! Don’t slurp your drink! Wait until everyone is done before asking for more!’

Like every child throughout the ages, I found these rules extremely annoying growing up – and I must confess that at age seventy I don’t always follow all the rules when the two of us sit at the table.

When Mrs. U and I eat alone, I have been known to rest on my elbows and help myself for a few seconds before she finishes. Occasionally I also break more modern etiquette rules by, for example, checking my text messages and emails while we’re eating (smartphones didn’t exist when I was growing up, or they would certainly be banned at the table).

You might even catch me, horror of horrors!, lighting a cigarette between aisles when we’re alone. This is a vice I inherited from my late father, who used to indulge in what he called his “community cigarette” – a joke he always found funny, even after years of repetition.

But when we have guests, or when others invite us to eat with them, I wouldn’t dream of behaving like that. Like most of my generation, I do my best to follow the old rules.

However, if a poll this week is to be believed, old-fashioned table manners will soon be a thing of history. A survey of 2,000 teenagers and adults found that 60 percent of young people between the ages of 12 and 27 – also known as Generation Z – no longer consider table manners important in general.

More than three-quarters of them, according to Censuswide, indicate that they are not concerned about elbows on the table, while more than half think it does not matter which direction a knife and fork are held.

Having raised four boys, I know that many in this age group, left to their own devices, would collapse on the floor in front of the television and eat takeaway pizza with their fingers rather than sit down at the table. with cutlery.

But Gen Z appears to be far from alone when it comes to thinking that table manners are past their prime, as the survey found that 54 percent of Brits of all ages say they are a thing of the past.

I can’t help but feel that if this is true, we risk throwing away something very precious. Because don’t table manners, like so many time-honored conventions of social interaction, simply boil down to politeness and consideration for others?

Take the elbow rule. The idea is simply that we shouldn’t make those sitting next to us feel uncomfortable by putting up a barrier between us or invading their space, like those antisocial men who sit with their legs wide apart on the subway or the sit in the bus. .

The same goes for sitting upright, rather than slouching or leaning back on our chairs. It is a sincere courtesy to our hosts, who may have gone to great lengths to prepare and cook our meal, not to approach their hospitality too casually.

As for being careful not to talk with our mouths full, or to swallow our food, or to make noises like pigs at the trough, there are simple enough reasons for those rules: a large number of people find such behavior abhorrent, and it makes them think. from their food. That’s not to mention the danger of half-chewed pieces splashing all over us.

Indeed, I have a friend who no longer invites one of his oldest friends to dinner because he finds his table manners so disgusting.

Meanwhile, some people are apparently so sensitive to the slightest sound of food that the Lilian Baylis Studio, Sadler’s Wells, has issued a ‘trigger warning’ for this month’s production of entertainment called Out (‘reclaiming Dancehall and celebrating queerness under the bittersweet scent of oranges’, if you’re interested).

This tells audience members with misophonia – an extremely emotional response to sounds – that they ‘find some parts uncomfortable’ as oranges are eaten on stage!

Well, I wouldn’t go that far myself (unless perhaps I was looking for publicity for a terrible sounding production). But we’ve all encountered people whose slurping and slurping makes it difficult for us to swallow another bite.

Yes, of course, ways of doing things change from century to century and from country to country. After all, the toffs of ancient Rome hung on the benches as they dined, Tudor nobles ate with knives and fingers, thinking forks were strictly for namby-pamby foreigners, while in some societies today it is seen as the pinnacle of good manners to belching loudly at the table, in appreciation of the food.

So I accept that the rules are not set in stone – and I don’t think they should be.

In particular, I will not regret if the widespread, snobbish belief that there is a right and a wrong way to hold a knife comes to an end (“I still hear my late grandmother’s voice who says, Lady Bracknell-like: ‘My Dear, Mr So-and-so holds his knife like a pencil!’)

After all, making others feel uncomfortable or uncomfortable is the exact opposite of good manners.

Nor will I mourn the passing away of other old conventions still practiced by proponents. For example, it has long seemed wrong to me that we all have to wait until everyone has been served before we eat. This means that those who are served first have to just sit there while their food gets cold in front of them. – something that is especially unfair to women, in those households where the ladies are always served before the men.

As much as we beg our guests to start while their food is hot, many find that they simply can’t eat until everyone else has food.

In the same illogical way, I cannot sleep on the right side of the bed, if you look at the feet, because I was raised to believe that a right-handed gentleman always sleeps on the left side, so as to keep his sword arm free to block intruders in the night without leaning over his queen.

I also feel terribly uncomfortable walking down the street with a woman unless I’m sitting on her “carriage side”, closest to the road. As older readers will know, this rule dates back to the days when the roads were awash with excrement, both horse and human, and it was considered a gentleman’s duty to take the brunt of the splashes whenever a carriage passed by.

It is true that the water companies seem to be doing their utmost to make this issue relevant again. But I can’t imagine such arcane conventions lasting much longer, and I won’t pretend to regret it.

But oh, what a mistake it would be to completely rip up the rules, whether in the bedroom, at the dinner table or in any other area of ​​life.

In this age of the litter, the street hog, the internet troll, the sidewalk cyclist and the losers who refuse to give up their seats to feeble old ladies on the bus, wouldn’t a revival of some of the old pleasantries cheer us all up?